A new, six-disc anniversary box set offers a holistic look at the album with demos, a completely remixed version of the record, and a live recording.

It’s the sound of a freewheeling star at the top of her game, reimagining rock history in her own platinum image.

More than 50 years later, the fuzzed-out riffs and mellow harmonies are still intact, the lyrics just as heartfelt.

It’s rare to hear Dylan sound like a fan trying to be a peer, but that’s what’s evident here. Those sessions serve as the core of Travelin’ Thru, Dylan’s 15th “Bootleg Series” release, but since the Man in Black is spry and dominant throughout — he’s the true star here — it could also be a new entry in his own Bootleg Series.

The plaintive, direct singing mode is West’s best delivery vehicle across the album. The rapping is uniformly lackluster when not delivered by one of the brothers Thornton in their return as legendary rap duo Clipse.

With its carefully-crafted sequencing and seamless interludes, Kiwanuka feels like a proper old-fashioned album constructed as such, with some of its brightest highlights buried deep into the record’s latter half.

No Home Record finds Gordon stepping out in search of life after Sonic Youth, musically and perhaps lyrically, and the ride can be pretty mesmerizing.

Ghosteen is a masterpiece of melancholy. You mourn right along with him and hope he finds solace.

uknowhatimsayin¿ succeeds as a kind of high-wire act that balances Brown’s folk hero status against his documentarian sensibilities, tragedy against comedy, bluster against self-mockery. It’s shorter than his previous albums, and also lean in a way that few other rappers could replicate. Five albums in, he remains a singular talent who only needs a few short words to tell a good story.

The muddiness of the recording functions as a unifying effect, although sometimes you wish the murk would clear a bit, because the music makes you want to push up front and hear what’s happening.

Ode To Joy shows off some of Wilco’s prettiest and most comforting songs, Tweedy’s enlarged heart transplanted back into a band — its lineup now unchanged for roughly half of its 25-year history — that’s never sounded more empathic.

DaBaby’s regular invocation of vehicular speed makes KIRK feel like one continuous, relentless flex.

Olsen’s up to something different here, inviting a different sort of attention to fully absorb. It’s worth the investment; the emotion’s as visceral as it is complex, and it ranks among the best sounding records this year, deserving to be cranked on a good sound system — an album to spend time with, to fall into, to shut up and let yourself be kissed by.

Feels like something wholly outside of and unplaceable within the Tegan and Sara canon; while its not quite as fledgling as the songs may have been in their original nature, the album itself doesn’t feel as tight as their of-the-moment projects. But maybe that’s what makes this type of experiment — teenage musical revisitation — successful.

Giles Martin and Sam Okell have done a new mix in stereo, 5.1 surround sound and Dolby Atmos. The mix does wonders for moments like the three-way guitar duel in “The End,” with Paul, George and John trading off solos live on the studio floor. The Sgt. Pepper and White Album sets were packed with mind-blowing experiments and jams, but Abbey Road is considerably more focused. In these 23 outtakes and demos, you hear a band in the zone, knowing exactly what they want to do, working hard to finesse the details, even the ones only they’ll notice.

When Simpson does sing, much of what he has to say is similarly self-referential. He’s angstier than ever on Sound and Fury, plagued by his public platform, preoccupied with the way he’s been misunderstood and boxed in by an unforgiving music industry. Simpson sells such discontent with a fury that makes it seem as though he’s the first rockstar who’s ever had to deal with such problems.

Sure, the hooks and the lyrics are as sharp as ever, too, the latter functioning as part anxious messages-in-bottles, part baroque bubblegum life preservers. It’s panic-attack pop, fretting its way through vintage good-time chord changes, and letting us know we’re not alone.

Robertson pops off some hot wah-wah’d leads, and you remember: this guy is one of the greatest guitarists in the history of rock. Ultimately, the best moments on Sinematic are those kind. Robertson’s guitar is a voice that always rings true.

[“I Need A Teacher”'s video is] an inspiringly optimistic vision of good people demanding a fairer world, broken American moment be damned. All of Terms of Surrender follows that sweetly humane vibe, balancing Taylor’s feelings of depression and doubt with gorgeously homespun music and a sense of family as guiding light in difficult moments.

It’s not merely the nods to emo’s evolution that wins the guys big-boy points. Some of the breakup songs here are positively nuanced, like “Hungover You,” which unfolds into a portrait of two codependent alcoholics. (The chorus actually goes too hard, but Skiba’s delicate pre-chorus is a balm.)

They’re back with the fantastic new Memory, unafraid to show their scars as they find new ways to nuance a sound that beautifully takes Eighties and Nineties indie noise back to Sixties girl groups, surf-rock and California pop.

It wouldn’t be a Gallagher record without an ode to John Lennon, and Why Me? Why Not checks all the boxes.

It’s a total departure, her kaleidoscopic mix of decades’ worth of R&B, hip-hop, blues, and gospel, steeped in trippy laptop sonics and deeply personal political urgency. ... “I just want Georgia to notice me,” she sings, confronting oppression with faint hope. It’s a strikingly bold moment on a record that’s full of them.

They’re trapped in the dusk on most of the album, and it’s the few beacons of light here, when they sound like they’re all having fun, that cut through the darkness and make for great Pixies songs.

Mostly, the tech-fetishism, pop hooks, and idiosyncratic heart work together, with Charli functioning as much as expert curator and cheerleader as main attraction.

Post Malone curates as much as he creates, and there’s not a misplaced feature among the 10 spread across seven of these tracks.

In its length, quality, and economy, Close It Quietly can evoke tour de force sprees like Elvis Costello’s Get Happy! or Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville. Kline sings about some serious coming-of-age stuff here, but in the casual way of someone organizing their room, not getting lost in the pathways of their ennui.

Saves the World isn’t self-aware so much as frighteningly emotionally intelligent. The sensitive feelers that populate the group’s sadsack pop tales are sharp analyzers of the behavior around them, as quick to deftly psychoanalyze (see the devastating second verse of “Taken”) as they are to simply point the finger at themselves.

Freedom to Pop, at least on this album, is a certain restrained swagger. The guitars simmer, never boil. The bass swells, and the keyboards shimmer behind him. And all the while, Pop flexes his baritone, expressing himself more clearly than perhaps ever before.

While the QC headliners spend much of Vol. 2 spinning their wheels, the undercards provide the more compelling draw and show occasional flashes of brilliance.

On Lost Girls, she has come into her own. Her world is burning and she’s willing to go up in flames right along with it.

It’s the presence of Williams, who co-produced the LP with her husband Tom Overby, that ties Sunset Kids together. A master lyricist, she helps Malin refine and focus his own words.

Fear Inoculum is a very good Tool record.

Her latest, Like the River Loves the Sea, feels simultaneously grounded and even more expansive as it tracks its way through the changing seasons of a relationship.

What’s most impressive about The Highwomen, handsomely produced with Nashville neoclassicist Dave Cobb, is how artfully, and matter-of-factly, it engages social issues. Credit the concentration of songwriting talent. Every woman here is at the top of her game.

Iconology is only 15 minutes of music, so it leaves you hungry for more.

The long-awaited Norman Fucking Rockwell is even more massive and majestic than everyone hoped it would be. Lana turns her fifth and finest album into a tour of sordid American dreams, going deep cover in all our nation’s most twisted fantasies of glamour and danger. No other songwriter around does such an expert job of building up elaborate romantic fantasies, and then burning them to the ground.

Eve is more than a sign of the times. Easily one of the best rap records of the year, it’s the sound of a skilled artist becoming a vital one, and asserting her place not only in the genre but in the world.

The special-guests duets record is a famously fraught exercise, one that’s almost predestined to be bogged down by its own attention-grabbing premise. Threads hardly escapes that predicament, but it’s filled with enough solid songcraft to make one hope that Crow isn’t, in fact, truly done with record making for good.

They rarely take these topics [mental health, relationships, addiction, and their faith in God] too far past surface level brushes, resulting in a lot of talking sad and saying nothing.

Wystrach occasionally garbles his lines to the point of unintelligibility — try to decipher all of “I Love You, Goodbye” without a lyric sheet — but he’s a magnetic presence and gives some of his strongest vocal performances, growling with gusto on “Every Song’s a Drinkin’ Song” and crooning delicately on “Put the Hurt on Me.”

Thankfully, Tucker’s latest never succumbs to old-age weariness.

On Anak Ko, she’s keeps doing it. The musical range is unsurprisingly wide, shifting from the swirling dreampop to dire guitar grind to smooth Seventies softness to Yo La Tengo-ish, country-tinged guitar pastorals to Nineties alt-rock. It’s all leveraged towards an unguarded sense of personal revelation.

Lover is, fittingly, evolutionary rather than revolutionary. But nevertheless it feels like an epiphany: free and unhurried, governed by no one concept or outlook, it represents Swift at her most liberated.

Building on their prior LP, Sheer Mag broaden their scope just a little more on A Distant Call while retaining the DIY grit and edgy concision that made them so arresting in the first place. This might technically be a concept album, but at 35 minutes, it’s still a punk rager at heart.

So Much Fun doesn’t mark a step forward for his aesthetic, but rather an attempt to refine it.

He is a genuinely engaging artist who raps with impressive intensity and clarity, if not nuance. He confronts his incurable sadness head-on, and it’s easy to identify with his mental health struggles. But for an album about depression, The Search contains a noticeable lack of tension and interior texture.

Just as Some Girls rejuvenated Mick and co., the Hold Steady’s latest finds the Brooklyn collective rediscovering the mix of morose jubilation and joyful myth-making they perfected a dozen years ago. Freed from the pressures of serving as Craig Finn’s primary creative outlet, the band has learned how to keep telling its hoodrat saga.

Of course, at the core of all Vernon’s albums are potent songs, branded with his magnificently swooning melodic sensibility and gorgeous singing. This set has a few of those songs.

Sleater-Kinney deliver the goods almost immediately on their new LP, on a title track that begins with industrial clangs, then explodes into rock fury rivaling anything in their catalog.

Most of his 10th album, Port of Miami 2, is Ross exactly as you know and love him: the obscene boasts, the window-cracking bass, the speedboat cool, the various spins on raps-to-riches success.

The songs collected here are the tracks that didn’t make the albums and never hit the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 (22 of his other songs have). But as missives from an artist whose genius is surfing trends, staying in the conversation and testing to find out what works at any given moment, they collectively get at the soul of his artistic project.

With all of the band’s nu-metal hallmarks at the forefront this time, We Are Not Your Kind sounds the more like the head-turning, self-titled debut they put out 20 years ago than any of their releases since. But what’s different here is a new sense of (gasp!) sophistication.

Cuco transmutes various pop methodologies to create his own blend of burnout soul.

She turns eighteen this month, so raise your Big Gulp: as pop success stories go, this is a refreshing one.

His superb major label debut Brandon Banks is sprawling autobiography overflowing with dense, unflinching, granular detail sourced from his 15-odd years of toting guns, staging robberies, and selling drugs in Southwest Houston.

The Big Day contains about as much tonal variation as a leather-bound wedding photo album. Chance is more interested in celebrating the miracle of love than examining love’s warts, or the labor required to build and sustain a lasting marriage.

They’re still fun and vital, and they still know how to make an exit.

The gem here is the new song, “No Bullets Spent,” which is about praying for the end of some existential anguish (“What we need now’s an accident/No one to blame and no bullets spent”). It could be about politics, it could be about a bad day frontman Britt Daniel had waiting for his number to be called at the DMV. Regardless, it’s another catchy, taut, perfectly restrained rocker that belongs in a collection like this.

Ultimately, The Gift is a deft balancing act that weighs personal songwriting flourishes and meaning with Disneycore tropes, as well as a sincere desire to celebrate the music of the African diaspora with its fundamentally commercial obligations.

The Lost Tapes II, is a grab bag of loose tracks from this era, four very different album sessions, and naturally it’s a messy display of the many sides of Nas – storyteller, street life narrator, conscious MC, rap showboat, true-school historian, emo diarist – at both his most essential and least essential.

As a stand-alone piece of music, its pacing tends to remain too static to uphold its heavy premise. The best songs arrive far too late, and early tracks like “How Many Times” and “Giant Baby” can be hard to distinguish from recent Coyne experiments like 2017’s Oczy Mlody.

One of the greatest rhythm sections to ever rub-a-dub on planet Earth, Sly and Robbie’s client roster has included Dylan, Madonna, Serge Gainsbourg, and No Doubt. But the team’s best jams are the most deeply rooted in the Jamaican music they helped invent — at the core of Peter Tosh’s band; with the Compass Point All-Stars; and on their own Taxi Records sessions, source of some of the reggae canon’s mightiest sides. Their ur-grooves justify from the get-go Red Gold Green & Blue, a set of blues, r&b and soul covers of the sort that might otherwise land like pro-forma, unessential nostalgia.

Sheeran’s unobtrusively sweet voice easily slips between genres, but he struggles to connect with many of his A-list guest artists, deepening the album’s isolated mood.

Purple Mountains is the sound of that guy starting to come to terms with his reality, and maybe building a new emotional architecture in the wreckage. In any case, keep ’em coming. The journey is worth it.

Banks clearly encouraged them [her collaborators] to swing for the fences: The distressed sonics her get as extreme as Low got on last year’s Double Negative, albeit in much different context. It’s thrilling, gutting stuff.

If you liked Warm, you’ll like Warmer. It’s Tweedy at his most self-findingly laid back, low-key and ruminative, leavening intimate recreational folk-rock with offhanded guitar tastiness.

Case Study has gorgeous moments, but it lacks the overall clarity and focus of Freudian.

Ultimately, Oasis is a document of how far Balvin and Benito have come, and a blueprint of where they are headed.

An album that somehow exceeds the lofty expectations he and Madlib set with Piñata.

Help Us Stranger and Let’s Rock are simply great records from very different bands coming from the same ideals: Rock is a living thing, and guitars can be your best friends in the war on jive.

Help Us Stranger and Let’s Rock are simply great records from very different bands coming from the same ideals: Rock is a living thing, and guitars can be your best friends in the war on jive.

It’s “woke,” but in the sense of “sleep-deprived so long the fluttering of your eyelids booms like kettledrums,” and that realm of paranoid body-freezing anxiety is the zone where Yorke feels right at home.

There’s so much going on here that nothing ever gets bogged down enough to fees indulgent or wanky; most songs clock in at under five minutes, and even the longer ones seem to go by in a blip, as if pranking our iPhone-addled attention spans. Indeed, there’s humor here.

With 7, instead of blurring the country and rap lines further, he takes the well-trod path to the rock and rap border. Like country-rap, rap-rock is a genre we’ve endured for a long time, maybe too long. Lil Nas X’s version is much more nuanced, if a tad straight-laced.

Rise shows where the band’s three stars’ personalities unite in a Venn diagram and work together well. It’s just that these Vampires sound best when they’re sharing the same blood source.

Hot Chip have always made songs that slip between the erotic and and neurotic, but this time out there’s another level, as the tracks slip sideways to comment on our upside down world. From the gospel preaching about peace on the opener, “Melody of Love,” to the dark images of dancing in circles “like we’re dead” in the closer, “No God,” these songs combine difficult thoughts and easy pleasures. Complicated music for strange days and nights.

Late Night Feeling is the better album [than 2015's Uptown Special] — rangy, sexy and fairly seamless, an LP to play all the way through after a night of clubbing if you happen get lucky, or if you don’t. If there’s a problem, it’s songwriting and processed vocals that can feel anonymous; bold-faced names lost in string arrangements, pillowy reverb and period simulacra in a way the singers on Daft Punk’s like-minded Random Access Memories managed to avoid.

Nelson’s vocal prowess remains unaffected by age, timeless in its singular phrasing and unconventional approach to rhythm. On Ride Me Back Home, he uses his voice, that profound American musical instrument, to convey his Texas zen on songs like the title track and the fresh original “One More Song to Write.”

While his fellow countryman J Balvin has doggedly furthered the ascendance of urbano in the American mainstream, Maluma’s greatest strength lies in his adaptability. As part of a new generation of Latin vocalists racing to win the hearts of fans stateside, and well beyond, 11:11 sees Maluma at the brink of the finish line.

There is a real adventurous spirit these lithe, freewheeling bummer-bot jams.

Madame X is so admirably bizarre, all you can do is stand back and watch the girl go.

For an artist whose music aimed for maximum accessibility, often to a fault, Avicii may well be remembered as an innovator. Sadly, this record feels like he was just getting started.

Midnight pushes well past the hard-scrabble drive of her 2017 debut Messes, with a bigger, rangier sound.

She Is Coming is an unkempt little EP that tries to cram her wild oeuvre, from molly to Mark Ronson, into just six songs. That said, you can’t deny Cyrus remains a freak of pop nature.

The 15 songs range from entertaining throwaways to top-shelf Prince, making this basically a very good golden-era Prince album, with material recorded entirely between 1981-85 but for the ’91 version of “Love… Thy Will Be Done,” a hit that year for Martika.

Dylan is the unquestioned star, the magnetic, assured center of the sprawl. ... The longer view afforded by Dylan’s full set lists, rehearsals almost to opening night (with songs that appear nowhere else in the set) and a disc of additional rarities from along the itinerary captures both the acute showman’s focus the singer brought to this enterprise and the accelerating, play-for-the-moment drive that climaxes in that “Isis” from Montreal.

Africa Speaks is not the sort of record to listen to on headphones; you have to hear the way it springs forth from speakers, like a live performance, to fully appreciate it. There aren’t any Billboard-targeting hits here — there’s no “Smooth” or even an “Oye Como Va,” though “Breaking Down the Door” comes close — and that’s part of the appeal. Woodstock was 50 years ago; this is Santana now. The spirit is the same, yet somehow it’s even freer.

Regardless of how you view the album Kind Heaven, it’s best digested in microdoses.

A lushly orchestrated set of throwback, country-tinged folk pop that, despite some resemblance to previous works like Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad, sounds like little else in his catalog. Frankly, its sheen is off-putting at first. But once you settle in, the set reveals some of Springsteen’s most beguiling work ever.

Some tracks feel like freestyles, with Biblical allusions that veer into babbling chants, snarls and shrieks. Sherwood’s signature sound is crisper and brighter than vintage Perry; the grooves here are mostly taut, whirlpooling gradually, with dub pyrotechnics largely reined in.

Tenderness is a grand gesture that works. Woke looks good on Duff.

There are lots of ideas here, and lots of notes--a plus or a minus depending on your mindset--distributed over 27 tracks, nearly half of which clock in under two minutes. Some of these short sketches provide the most delicious moments.

Released just nine months after Stay Dangerous, 4REAL 4REAL flies well below the lofty standard YG set with his first two albums and smells of his eagerness to get out of his label contract.

Apart from a few genre exercises that, at this point, can feel phoned-in from a stylist as well-studied as Earle (see the honky-tonking “Pacific North Western Blues”), The Saint of Lost Causes lives up to its title, serving as a refreshing reminder of what the songwriter has always done best.

For California Son, the Pope of Mope has picked 12 lilting tales of injustice and unrequited love by some of his favorite artists and re-orchestrated them for his voice, improving some and turning others into head scratchers.

The enhanced instrumentation and dreamy songwriting make this the singer’s strongest album yet.

She delves into her emotions and wears them on her jersey, and though at times this vulnerability and malaise feels tiresome, it’s her self-exploration that makes it worthwhile.